JANUARY 2000
I’D DISCOVERED THAT YOU COULD TAKE ONE SHINY pink pill and dance until the sunrise broke across the sky. And that yawning chasm within you could be very good for an echoing beat and the reverberation of music through your chest, your bones, until you didn’t feel quite so hollow anymore.
I celebrated the new millennium in a basement club in New York.
Lana had advised me to get cash out in case the stock market crashed, so I had a purse full of bills and a room full of people desperate to exchange it (powders, pills, smiley-faced little tabs, all at my disposal).
I was so high all I remember were some bright flashing lights and lips against mine.
Apparently I wasn’t the only one.
Joel Ingram and Harper Moore Share
Steamy New Year’s Kiss at Star-Studded
Party on West Hollywood’s Strip
Rang some headlines, while others opted for:
Nadine Gaywood: Starlet Rings in the New Year at Iconic LGBT Bar
Which was one of the funnier things that happened during my time in New York: I became a queer icon. Gathered amongst names like Madonna, Cher, and Judy Garland, I became one of those divas adored by my own community but who obviously wasn’t a part of it.
I’d never kept my queerness a secret; it was more that no one cared to see it.
But now here I was, darling of the New York gay scene and still every time they snapped me kissing a woman it was seen as more of the result of the bar than the gay part of the headline.
Oh look, Nadine Heywood’s had a few too many drinks.
She’s being silly, flippant, fun. It’s nice seeing her with friends, isn’t it? Such a cute celebration of girl power.
I was too preoccupied to care.
I was cutting loose, but I’ll be honest, it was still in a very Nadine sort of way.
I thought if I could schedule it, wrangle it into a shape that fit my life, I could control it. I could calculate when I’d need to be sober by, work around rehearsals and performances, and still put on one hell of a show.
For a while, I did.
I was starring in Hedda Gabler on Broadway.
If acting was the only time I felt normal, I’d determined to do it as much as possible, and hence the theater beckoned.
I also thought it might be useful to reconnect to what I missed from drama school and prevent those skills from drying up—especially all that time spent learning how to perform beyond the front row.
Which is where Harper sat on opening night, Joel Ingram’s arm around her shoulder and her nestled right into his side.
She was so offensively happy.
Which she was clearly here to show me.
Well, whatever. Who wasn’t fucking happy around here? Hedda was vicious, cold, and wounded. I could play that well.
I told the backstage crew to let Harper through, Joel in tow. His name had made it across the Atlantic in a big way after the 1998 World Cup, his football career gaining steady momentum, but his modeling, acting, and TV personality career was skyrocketing.
From the way he clutched Harper’s waist, it was clear cups weren’t the only thing he cared to win. I couldn’t take my eyes off the broad span of his hand on her.
I won’t pretend he wasn’t handsome, but to me he just never fit with Harper—even there, even right before me.
She was sleek beauty and polished ease, whereas he was rough: messy hair and scruff on his chiseled jaw, thick, overgrown brows, and such an athletic build the muscles seemed to leap from him.
Still there was a tension between them, a mirroring, something I wasn’t even sure they noticed and something that made me furious.
“How lovely to meet the second most important person in Harper’s life,” Joel said, reaching out a hand and already laughing.
Well, that statement made me even angrier.
Harper ignored it. “That role was meant for you,” she said—which was hardly a compliment with a character like that, and I surmised that Harper was calling me a crafty, underhanded bitch.
And though I was yet to learn it: a woman who would do anything to avoid being under someone else’s control.
“I want you to know,” she said, putting on one hell of a performance of sincerity. “That with our history I didn’t think it appropriate to reach out. But I am sorry for your loss.”
“Thank you, Harper,” I said—because she was clearly saying it for Joel’s benefit, and I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction of telling her to shove it in front of him, so she could walk away and say, See, I told you that’s what she’s like.
“Well,” she said, a little disappointed.
I felt her eyes dip behind me—saw them catch on my dressing table.
The scattered makeup, the discarded accessories, and, of course, that old faux-turquoise necklace.
A talisman of luck, despite everything. Harper swallowed and looked back to me. “Break a leg for the rest of the run.”
———
I was surrounded by people in New York, especially with the way I was going about things, partying until dawn and still turning up for 7 a.m. run-throughs.
But it was crushingly lonely. You’d think I’d be used to that by now, but it was a different sort—to be so constantly surrounded by people and still feel so devoid of connection.
Strangely, I thought of Harper and her posse. Was that another point where she was winning? Were they actually close? Or did she feel some semblance of this too?
Harper and Joel dominated the headlines. They were fame’s wet dream. Beautiful, talented, and young. And they knew how to put on a show.
For their first date, Joel flew Harper to Venice and they ate cheese and drank sparkling wine while a gondola steered them through the city to the delight of the thousands of tourists whose cameras turned from historic beauty to this contemporary alternative.
I thought of Harper at CADS, the bright lights dimmed to a moonlit glow, reflecting off the stage like it might be the waters of Venice streaming beneath.
Her voice soft: “But love is blind, and lovers cannot see the pretty follies that themselves commit.” I’d been so pleased to be cast as Portia in The Merchant of Venice, a much bigger role—but I’d watched in the wings as Harper took to Jessica with tenderness and youthful hope, and I thought of what she told me over drinks a few years ago: “I know what I’m like when I’m blinded by love—I’ll do anything. I’d give it all up in an instant.”
And I knew we were in trouble, that she would fall for all this without hesitation.
She was front row at Joel’s next football game, and he ran right up when the whistle blew for intermission—or whatever it is they call it—and kissed her in front of the watching audience.
He hit the front pages a few weeks later, paying for a star to be named after her, and I thought of Abel Griffin showing her constellations and wondered why men always thought the universe would bend to their whims, could be commandeered into gestures of their own when they were indifferent gas fires and the true majesty was the woman who stood before them, fate not resting in their hands but hers.
Harper and Joel were so inseparably and obviously in love, but still I didn’t believe it—anyone could make grand public gestures, what were they like alone?
Harper’s mother had spent years publicly declaring her love, after all, while giving her very little of it.
Perhaps this had the same ring of disappointment.
But I was not a viewer from the outside, flipping through pages for tidbits.
This was my world. My sphere. And at every party, no matter how numb I made myself, how blurred I drew the lines of the world around me, someone would mention her.
At the launch of a new members’ club, Kayla Alexander declared that she’d never seen Harper so happy.
When the Oscars announced their nominations and nearly everyone in The Dollhouse was nominated except for Harper—a clear snub given her admittedly wonderful performance—Amos said a friend had been commissioned to make an outfit for a counter-party Joel was throwing for Harper on award night.
Days later, Lana said that an assistant she knew had to organize a mass clean-up for thousands of violets sent to Harper’s house, because purple was her favorite color.
But it wasn’t—anyone could see that. Harper’s scarlet nails and darker stained lips, the crimson art hung on her walls, the berry-red pop of her Lamborghini. Harper wanted to see the world bleed. She wanted it bright and loud and daring.
And given her penchant for messages in flowers, it should have been red carnations, speckled with baby’s breath. My heart aches for you. This love is everlasting.
Did Harper not see how amateur this all was?
It was embarrassing, this self-titled mastermind of my misery, succumbing so quickly to such weak affectation.
All she’d wanted was the public performance of love to match the private, but could she not raise that bar higher?
So what Joel was doing that for her? Couldn’t she want more?
Couldn’t she crave something as interesting as she was?
Then, in March, just three months after their first kiss: their wedding.
A secret ceremony that somehow leaked anyway (my money was on Greta Liao, hovering in the background of every shot). The photos were just blurry enough to entice and just clear enough to make you feel you were part of it.
I think I still have them, somewhere.
They followed it with a double-page spread in some magazine or other about their married life and the bliss of it all. The comfort of knowing, at the age of twenty-six, that you’d found your soulmate.
I’d never found Harper so vexing—a distraction that didn’t come in a pill or tab or line but one that consumed me all the same. Even if false, her veneer of joy provoked me. I wanted to send it crashing down.
So I set my investigator to find out what was really going on.
———
The thing about drugs, pretty universally, is that they’re good until they’re not. It’s under control until it’s not. It’s a secret until it’s not.